Three things:
At least 64 public or nonprofit universities and colleges have closed, merged, or announced closures or mergers since March 2020, in the United States. Yes, many US colleges are fading because in the age of abundance, who influences demand runs the show. There is no need to be studying in that crappy university when a better one is a click away. So, the competition is now both local and global with the best schools absorbing more and more students via different clusters of programs.
Google dropped $2.7 billion to re-hire a staff member who left to start his own company, in a deal structured to avoid antitrust, as companies prefer to license technologies from the small companies over acquiring them. But look deeper, it is a pure aqui-hire as over time that small company does nothing but serve the big acquirer.
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OpenAI co-founder and ex-chief scientist, Ilya Sutskever, raised $1 billion for his new AI firm Safe Superintelligence (SSI) within months after leaving the generative AI pioneer. SSI was valued at about $5 billion even though it will take months to have the products ready.
The decision by Google to throw that money for an AI great tells you that it has modeled that having the guy back is better than spending $billions on R&D with no assurance. For A16, Sequoia, DST Global and SV Angel which invested $1 billion in SSI, they have modeled that they have a higher odds of winning with SSI, than spreading that money over other 100 infant AI companies. Then the students who think they can get clear results over those local schools make the same case.
Have you thought that your company can just close the R&D unit because a 3-person team of techies have the results they want? And those results are exponential in impacts. Check well, bigtech is reducing footprints in their R&D efforts in the developing world as they fight for supremacy in the fledgling AI world where the rule is “the best or nothing”!
This is consistent with my thesis in a Harvard Business Review article here: the game will be played at home for North America and Western Europe, reshaping how they helped China to advance economically via outsourcing.
In its attempts to industrialize, Africa has looked toward China’s success. China designed and executed a policy that shrank the industrialization process in a mere 25 years — something many economies took at least a century to do. That redesign has brought immense dislocation in global commerce and industry, enabling China to become one of the world’s leading economies. African leaders have been pursuing policies designed to mimic China’s path. But despite these efforts, Africa has yet to advance in its industrialization at the same speed China did. Put simply, the things that worked for China will not work for Africa. Africa must change its focus: It must encourage internal consumption and intra-trade, push forward the African Continental Free Trade Agreement, create a single African currency, improve infrastructure, and invest in education.
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